Star Side

Chapter 60

It was his father who found me exercising one morning, and he had found it fascinating. After looking to both the eggs in the incubator and me, probably considering whether he wanted to do some grandpa-ing or look into whatever yoga I was doing, he fell beside me and tried to copy my moves. Through our broken speech he managed to convey that they had training exercises for soldiers, so he wasn't a stranger to exercise, but he'd never seen anything like yoga and was interested in seeing what my alien legs could do or, perhaps, learn something new to improve his own body. He took good care of it, apparently, as he proved by showing he was ten times more limber than I'd ever be.

"For tunnel digging," he insisted, caving his shoulders around his head to show how he could narrow his body into half its width.

I'd never get enough of that shoulder trick. It was just so damn weird.

Gilrack had none of that limberness. He told me later that he had lost that when he had grown wings. His 'bones' had stiffened and he worried how that would affect him traversing the tunnels. I didn't find anything exciting about fighting back claustrophobia by sticking oneself into rock crevices half my size, but, you know, to each their alien own. He couldn't understand what was so great about getting drunk, so there you have it. Not that I'd ever be getting drunk again, unless Levi decided to visit with his homemade moonshine in the future.

Which brought me to my first unpleasant discovery: the coms link didn't make it down here.

For whatever reason, either because of all the rock between us or something special in said rock, I couldn't reach Naomi and Levi and they couldn't reach me.

Thankfully, Gilrack was able to understand the controls enough to use the coms at the pod to let the two know they had reached the planet fine and that I was safely tucked away in the nicest accommodations his underground cave folk could offer. But the coms function on my handheld device was thoroughly useless.

I was okay with that. Gilrack promised to take me out to the pod when I got lonely for human conversation, so I settled with the other functions of my handheld pad, like the huge library of books I'd downloaded before coming here.

Gilrack, forever proving his repentance of stuffing eggs in me without my knowledge by being the best mate ever, also brought me what could only be paints, paintbrushes, and thin slate canvases.

"They are not as...nice as your paints," he had told me apologetically as he handed them over. "But we have artists too."

True, the paints weren't in as wide a variety as mine, nowhere near it, and some of them changed to completely different colors or just straight on gray when I mixed them, but hey, I wasn't picky.

A week after I had come I had my first artwork up on some free space on the shelves above the opposite end of the nest, next to the fireplace. It was just of the eggs sitting in a nebula, but I had put a stupid amount of effort into getting the right blue and purple of their shells so I was pretty proud. I knew it had been a week because the 'light stones' as Gilrack called them stuck in the ceiling faded with the rising and falling of the sun, despite being who knows how many feet away from the surface. Stupid useful rock, if I do say so myself. Seriously, what was the likelyhood?

But apparently Vetas had untold treasures in its depths that previous scans for precious resources to mine had missed. Treasures which Gilrack promised to show me once I felt safe leaving the cave to so a little exploring, though I'd have to go with his father if I did for he said, rather sadly, that his instincts would torture him if there wasn't at least one of us with the eggs at a time. Something about nurturing them with mind waves and just overall making sure they were safe. Which I could totally understand, as I didn't feel all that safe leaving them myself, even after a week of getting comfortable in this new world and having his attentive father and doting mother visiting us frequently.